THE MOST MUSICAL OF CARTOONISTS, CLIFF STERRETT loved to start up a round of songs as soon as guests stepped inside his house. \u201cHeavenly days, sit down won\u2019t you and I\u2019ll get some music going,\u201d Sterrett said one evening in 1922, almost immediately after writer Ring Lardner and cartoonist Tad Dorgan dropped by Sterrett\u2019s out-of-the-way house in Garden City, Long Island. Lardner and Dorgan were both sporty, metropolitan characters, in their comfort zone in pool halls and around boxing rings when they weren\u2019t drinking it up with their baseball-playing pals, so they were both struck by how Sterrett gave off the air of a bumpkin and a homebody even though he was one of America\u2019s most famous and well-paid cartoonists.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis family are all musicians but they play on instruments that no one ever lamped before,\u201d Dorgan reported in a characteristically chatty column, thick with 1920s smart-aleck lingo. \u201cHis wife plays a trick piano, his son Paul plays a violin that has one string and a phonograph horn attached to it. His brother Paul tickles a ukulele that is built like a butter barrel and Cliff himself plays on a saw with a violin bow that holds about 29 strings. And the songs. Whoa, January. They were favourites in Ozark mountains before Sitting Bull sat down. It might be good music, I can\u2019t swear that it isn\u2019t, but anyway you get an awful kicking watching the orchestra work. Right in the middle of the Ozark Anthem the day I was there a dog as big as a Shetland pony eased into the room and started to moan an accompaniment to the piece.\u201d<\/p>\n
After witnessing Sterrett at home, Dorgan started pondering the old adage, \u201cYou can take a hick out of the country but you can\u2019t take the country out of a hick\u201d It\u2019s an open question whether Sterrett was a \u201chick\u201d or something much more complicated: a smart, sly man who liked to play at being a hayseed. Perhaps like many other members of the cartooning tribe, Sterrett enjoyed stylizing himself as a living caricature. Like his characters, Sterrett, who was 5\u20196\u201d tall, could be a funny-looking bird, with his moon-round face and upturned nose (described as \u201cretrousse\u201d on his passport), large mouth, fair complexion, blue eyes, and light brown hair.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Jog mentioned yesterday, there\u2019s a new collection of Cliff Sterrett\u2019s Polly and Her Pals hitting comic book stores today. I wrote the introduction to it, so I risk becoming a Stan Lee type self-promoter if I say too much about it. But really, of the many books I\u2019ve had a hand in, this is high up there as among the best. My introduction runs to 8,000 words and discusses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[248,332,639,811,1114,1193,1256],"class_list":["post-7306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-cliff-sterrett","tag-dean-mullaney","tag-j-heer","tag-lorraine-turner","tag-rind-lardner","tag-shameless-promotion","tag-tad-dorgan"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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